In the Midst of Summer I Am Dead

The Sinusitis Blues.

Today, it is almost-midsummer and

I feel as dry as a leaf at the end of autumn and

As dead as the midst of winter and

As fragile as a spring shoot.

Today, I feel like I have lost myself again.  I lose myself every day and then find myself again.  Reborn every day.  Today, I feel the monster reaching out his claw from the green murk to clutch my ankle.

I look back on things that I have written in previous years and they sparkle in a way that I feel like I have lost, at least for the moment.  Today, I am beaten down.  Perhaps it's just simply the fact that I am in the midst of yet another sinus-related thing, and I feel bad because I feel useless.  I feel like I want to be a hermit and never go anywhere and yet I feel guilty about that too.  I do not feel like I will be able to sparkle anymore.  But then I look at something I wrote two weeks ago and there it is again, the sparkle.  And tomorrow or the day after or the week or month after I will be back in that space again, actually walking around in it, all three dimensional.

Time is becoming stranger to me as I go on.  And I know that it is a false conception to think I sparkled in previous years more than I do now because I wasn't sparkling then, any more than I am sparkling now.  It's just the benefit of hindsight, the safety that comes from the past that is sealed, combined with reading the things that come from the writing space where I feel more myself and safer than the me who walks around bumbling.

Some days, I feel so exposed, like other people are tsunamis and I am a baby beech.  Some days, I feel like the stuff that is in me, the good and sweet and lovely, is not for any of you to see because how could I trust anyone with that?

I know what this is.  This is trauma.  This is limbic and wordless.

I have gained some traction with this space, believe it or not.  I will tell you about it sometime soon. 

But today, I feel so beaten down by the world, by everything, by the spaces that I love and which for today at least are lost.  I have lost the Godspace.  Which probably means it's closer than ever before.  Sometimes when you feel like you are losing something, what is actually happening is that you are gaining something new.  Transmutation.  My word for the year.  Sometimes the monster swims up from the depths into the space where you can see him.  He's been there all along, under the conscious sea.  But when he comes up, though he is you and he has lived within you perhaps for your whole life, you recoil from him in horror.

But perhaps he is a monster only by dint of him being the Other within your own body.  You react the way all humans react when they are scared and something other than them is facing them:  you feel an antipathy, a horror.  Sometimes the horror is in direct correlation to the things that are stored without your knowing in the undersea of your own self.  And then someone out there pops up and presses buttons you don't even know you have and would be horrified to know that you did.

We are a deeper sea than we like to think.

But it's not all clunking chains and dead carcasses and hairy monsters down there.  There are the most beautiful schools of fish, made of gossamer.  There are laboratories of alchemy down there, sealed from the water and hidden from sight.  The You that you don't know very well is cooking up things and while S/he does, it feels like it is some sort of evil.  It feels like you are dying.  But sometimes hairy monsters do not stay hairy monsters forever.  That's why stories exist about frogs and princes. 

I feel today like I am dying.  But everyone who swims in these waters knows, that's not the end of the story.

And yet even so, I feel like help!, like I have lost myself again, and that feels very unsafe. Even while I know it's not the whole of the matter or the end of it either.